Paid and Loving Eyes

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

« ^ »

We were given a splendid tour. That is, we were finally shown our own stuff in situ.

“Vibration-proof,” Lorela Chevalier said, spinning in a doorway. “Double reinforced glass, triple-access doors, tacky mats against quartz dust.”

“Thermal control a particular reliability?” I asked.

She darted me a hesitant smile, tried to make it genuine. “Of course, Henry. Barometric pressure…” She started a routine prattle, from the Repository catalogue. I could have said most of it with her. Tonto Macllvenny, our specialist blammer—destructive break-in artist who does over antique dealers’ shops throughout East Anglia, but who charges travel expenses from our village —always carries a copy. It’s a joke in the Arcade for the dealers to chorus bits from it when Tonto’s done over some rival the night previous.

“Walls specially constructed to provide an—”

—effective barrier against any attempted intrusion, whether direct or by undermining, my memory trolled along. God, I could even remember where the catalogue’s punctuation went wrong.

“—thus proving the most reliable storage system available.” Lorela got desperately brighter, sensing something amiss. “These are coupled with a special security staff selected after—”

What would con artists do without the word “special”? Not quite so well, that’s what.

We endured the tour. We saw our genuine antiques being marked Shipment! To be Notified!, through milky glass panelling, in a split-level storage compartment, the grimmest half-acre of protection I’d ever seen. I tried to look impressed. We peered through the thickest wobble glass on earth at where our superb fakes were being shrouded, ticketed, arranged, coded.

“Why’s the storage separate from the others?” I asked, innocent. We’d come down a mile of corridors.

“The vehicles, Henry,” Lorela answered, having recovered from that twinge of doubt. “It saves on moving shipment articles twice. Though,” she quickly added,“ the Repository is fully insured at Lloyd’s against any kind of…”

And so to bed. We were offered nosh, which Monique declined, maddening me. It’s all right for them, but no sympathy for a hungry bloke who needs regular stoking.

“No, thank you, Miss Chevalier,” Monique said. “Henry has other duties today.”

A cat can look at a king, they say. Ballocks, I thought morosely, following Monique meekly out to our Rolls. Monique’d vaporize me if I so much as mentioned lust, love, sex, desire, passion… Passion? I watched her, more than the entourage who assembled to wave us off. Passion? Monique must be moved by something akin to it, to go to all this trouble. I made my merci-beaucoups and waved absent goodbyes to Lorela.

“How long’d it take you, Monique, setting it up?”

“Two long years, Lovejoy.” She settled back into the plush upholstery, practically purring. Replete? “Your infantile behaviour in there almost wrecked it.” She turned lazy eyes on me. “For a moment I wondered what you were up to.”

“Eh?” I gaped. “I was helping, for Christ’s sake! You women. I got all sorts of stuff out of her. You’d never have noticed the infra-reds, heat-activateds, periodic blips —”

She smiled, eclipsing the sun’s reflected dazzle from the lake. I swallowed, had to look away. “You did quite well, I suppose.”

But it wouldn’t have mattered if you hadn’t done a damned thing, Lovejoy. That’s what she was saying. Once I’d divided the wheat from the chaff, my usefulness had ended. For good. The security of the entire Repository was somehow irrelevant. But why? Colonel Marimee and his merry men were going to raid it, steal everything I’d just sorted through. As if divining my worry, she asked, “Can you remember the security detail, Lovejoy?”

I erupted. “What the hell d’you think I was winkling them out of her for, silly cow?”

She laughed, and the sun followed its reflection into shade. No wonder poor Philippe Troude was hooked on her for life. But what’s the use of living in an orchard if you can only admire the apples, never taste? Except blokes are funny. They’ll starve in a prison of their own making rather than walk away to freedom. We have a bloke in our village plays a euphonium, the same musical phrase over and over, hour after hour. People say he’s loony, but he’s not. I asked him why didn’t he learn something else, whereon he instantly played me the loveliest solo I’d ever heard. The phrase he keeps playing—still does—is one he wronged in a band concert ten, twelve years ago. Came in half a bar late. His silver band lost the championship. Ever since, he’s played alone in his cottage, sadly getting it perfect, year after punishing year. He explained it all, anxiously bringing out the tattered music, showing me why his calamitous mistake wasn’t really his fault. I said why not forget it, and simply join a new band. He looked at me like I was an idiot. See what I mean? Like Troude, languishing in Monique’s disinterest instead of reaching out for Jodie Danglass who was crazy for him, or Diana, who was crazy for him. Or Almira W.W.C.F.H. Or Cissie, W. et eponymous cetera.

“Here, Monique. Why don’t you let Troude off the hook?”

She stared at me. The Rolls drifted round a bend. “I beg your pardon?” (No, not like that, more I beg your…) Meaning I was insolent. Women manage talk better than us. Maybe that’s why we don’t say as much as they do. Meaning talk as often. The thought lost itself in my labyrinthine mind.

“Jodie’d snap him up any day of the week. I can’t honestly see the point.”

“Who?” She was astonished at what I was asking.

“The antique dealer, Jodie. Brought me to Mentle Marina that time. You tried hoodwinking me over that ancient model boat, the chair.”

“The woman?”

“Didn’t you ever notice her, you selfish bi—?” I cut off, humming and hawing my way out to safety. “She’s a friend. Was. Almost was.” And added lamely, “Once.”

She said nothing, looked. Then clicked an intercom and gave Suit’s pendulous nape directions in, what, sort of French.

We drove to a place overlooking a massive lake. Took us an hour to get there, which I could ill afford. I was desperate to meet Gobbie, see how many pantechnicons he’d counted. If Lysette had done her job, she’d have followed them, and I’d know all.

“Where are we?” We alighted at a beautiful vantage point. The restaurant overlooked a promontory, some sort of turrets visible below, a few pretty houses, trees. A tiny steamer drew a dark mathematical wake in the shimmer.

No answer, just a stroll into this expensive place. They swept aside the need for reservation, awarded us the table Monique went to as a matter of course. I followed, wondering if any second I was going to get the elbow. Suit reduced daylight near the doorway, standing motionless. She ordered, offering me the choice but deciding everything, the way they do.

“Lovejoy.” Here it comes, I thought. A duchess doesn’t splurge on a serf for nothing. “Tell me. Why are you not afraid?”

“Why?” Was I asking did I have reason to be scared, or why ask such a barmy question?

She was inspecting me. From nothing I’d been promoted to vaguely interesting specimen, a blundering troglodyte.

“You are a scruff, poor as…” Her education came good. “An habitual criminal.”

Which raised the question of why she was bothering. “Am I discharged the service, like your Foreign Legionnaires?”

Her expression clouded. “You disturb me, Lovejoy. Most of what you say is imbecilic, except for certain phrases.”

“Look, Monique.” She was narking me more and more, and the bloody soup was frozen. It even had ice in the damned stuff. I gave it back to the waiter and said to warm it up, please. Even I can work a microwave, for God’s sake. He started a distressed harangue with Monique in explosive lingo. She shut him up. He crawled off with my soup. She’d started hers. Too polite to complain, I suppose. I went on, “I’m having enough trouble with the lingo. If it’s declensions you’re worried about you should have hired a certified linguist.”

“As you please.” I don’t like it when women give in that quick, because they never do unless they’re working something out. “But I find it strange that you often move so surely in areas of which you are supposedly ignorant.”

“Eh?”

“It happened a number of times at the Repository. You detect human fondnesses which others might miss.” That took some saying, but she did it, with pauses. “I’m unsure of you. Is it a quirk of speech? Or some intuition in your nature?”

My soup came back. The waiter managed not to chuck it at me, and retired rolling his eyes. “Well,” I told her defiantly, “he should have got it right in the first place.” Hot, at last.

“You mention the Foreign Legion. Our Red-and-Greens.” She looked at me as I quaffed away, but her eyes were somewhere else. “Founded in 1831, mainly to sweep up drunken German students bothering our towns. But French in culture, as we are. You can never understand, Lovejoy. Your multiculture society is hopeless. We meld all comers into one entity called France.”

“Or else what?” I’d have had the rest of her soup except the waiter would disintegrate when I told him to hot it up.

“Or else they are superfluous to requirements, Lovejoy.” The main course came steaming, thank God. The waiter was learning. “Our Legion’s desertion rate was never half that of the American forces, though envious nations make much of our discipline.”

Our? I tried to find a resemblance to Marimee in her features. Well, thinking of Veronique and her brother Guy. And Lysette, more platonically related to Jan.

“We French face an onslaught, Lovejoy. On spelling—you’ll not have heard of the criminals on Rocard’s High Council on the French Language, who want to change the spelling of nearly a tenth of our words. Or the idiot bureaucrats of Brussels who want to change them all! To compel us, by economic force. What is Brussels, but a suburb of a suburb? France is under attack. Washington’s population evaluers score Paris —Paris!—a mere seventy-two per cent. Our brilliant war record is decried as sham. Our superb wines are ignored; bribery among international judges! So we French now lead the world—in swallowing tranquillizers, twice the German rate! And in counterfeiting, of course. Along the Rue de la Grande Truanderie—the Street of Crooks, in your appalling language, Lovejoy—we excel in laserprinted fifty-franc notes.”

Nice does the best 200-franc notes, though, I’d heard, but wisely did not say. She almost hit two poor approaching waiters, who almost recoiled. She managed to stay silent until they’d poured the wine and retreated. “Our President learns from the American Secretary of State that France depends on U.S. nuclear technology, and has to admit ignorance of this at a public dinner table. Our airports score—”

“Can I start, love?” I was famished.

“—highly. But for what? Perfume! Nothing else!” Well I started anyway. “Our empire is gone, our currency surrenders to the Common Market. We must eat foreign food, as ordered by foreign minnows in Brussels! And our great Marseillaise is to be bowdlerized. No longer Aux armes, citoyens!” It’s to be All one, friends, dance hand in hand. Marchons becomes Skip on.” She was pale, her lips bloodless. “Rouget de Lisle will turn in his grave.”

“Politics is shifting sand.” I get uncomfortable.

“Once it was only the Americans—with their crass ambassadors. Camelot Country, whose President got the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage written by somebody else.” She became bitter, really vicious, the way all people speak of an envied friend. “Still, it shows there are advantages to having a President with a father capable of making a fortune from buying up cheap liquor licences during Prohibition.”

“Your art—” I was sick of her and her bloody whining. So folk have faults. What else is new?

“Is thieved, stolen. You see the headlines, Lovejoy: Paris: The Empty Frames! Our honour is shattered everywhere now that any hairy student actor can walk in and steal —”

“He wore a wig to look like a Rasta.” I had a mouthful. “Pretty clever. Sixteenth arrondissement, wasn’t it? Your Banditry Repression Brigade moved pretty sharpish.”

She fell silent. I looked up, waiting.

“You see, Lovejoy?” She’d cooled her ardour. “You are informed. It happens too often.”

“Don’t be daft, love. Everybody goes through a bad patch, even France. You’ve one of the loveliest countries on earth. Lovely lingo. Look at us. We drop clangers all over the place.”

“Clangers?”

“Faults, make mistakes. Christ, love, the Vatican’s own postage stamps got their Latin wrong last year! And C-14 carbon dating’s off by 3,500 years—when we thought it infallible!” I grinned. “Sometimes errors help. Like that statue of Hercules. Second century, right? Its top half’s in the Met—didn’t they pay to have it smuggled out of, where, Ankara? No wonder the Turks went mental. Where’re you from, love?”

“Marseilles.” It was out without thought. She shrugged, a pretty sight. A shoulder lifted, head a little aslant. Beautiful enough to paint, eat, love. Well, maybe not love. You’d never survive. “Now my city is broke, unemployment rife. Shops close daily. The French population declines, replaced by a tide of immigrants who know nothing of France. The great docks have moved to Barcelona—Barcelona!— and Anvers. The influx of Africans is said to number only 56,000, clearly false.”

“So?” I said cheerfully. “Incomers blend in two generations—”

“The main street was exquisite, Lovejoy.” She was toying wistfully with her food. It was a lovely pie thing, fish and mushrooms with some sauce stuff, vegetables undercooked, best meal on earth. I borrowed a bit from her plate while she talked, to help her. Her eyes were dreamy. “La Canebière outshone the Champs Élysées for glamour and luxury. Now it’s a series of cheap pizza stalls, an Arab souk where no self-respecting Frenchman walks at night unless with guard dogs. And even then you have to climb over filth, piled rubbish.” She focused on me. I was having her spuds. “You don’t think this reasonable, Lovejoy?”

“No, love. Not for self-indulgence. Londoners once petitioned against French immigrants for pinching jobs. Charles the Second had the sense to say no, let the Huguenots come.”

“Liberalism is weakness, Lovejoy.” She said it by rote.

“If you say so, love. Any chance of some more greens?” She signalled, the waiters sprang. “I don’t blame your dockies for demonstrating now the Spanish have abolished their Customs and Excise posts. Wherever there’s a border barrier, there’s a fortune in fiddles. That’s what they’re mad at.”

She watched me nosh. “My lovely Marseilles’ major product is now crime, Lovejoy. Gang wars, killings. France has left.”

“Anything I can do, love?” I honestly meant it. But what? Nostalgia’s the only untreatable disease.

“You’ve done it, Lovejoy. Divvying.” She asked a bit more about Jodie Danglass, who she was, what she did, but in malicious tones that gave me goose-pimples. Ten minutes later, me still trying to scoff some profiteroles, she upped and offed without so much as a word of warning. And that was that.

“How many, Gobbie?”

“Fifty-two, Lovejoy.”

“Where to?” Fifty-two pantechnicons? Christ.

“South at first. Hell of a convoy.” He grinned. “At first.”

“What do you mean at first?”

He was falling about, silly old fool. “They didn’t ever form up. They left in dribs and drabs. Know what, Lovejoy?”

“No?” Every van looked slightly different.

“They wus every shape and size you ever did see.” I’d counted on it. “Lysette’s chasing after three. She didn’t know what she oughter do. They’re labelled something about electricity.”

“The vans had different insignia?”

“Far as we could tell, son. We only guessed at fifty-two.” He went apologetic. “Three entrances, see? Only two of us counting, from hiding…”

Pity. If I’d been there, I could have told whether they had been crammed with antiques or not. Instead, I’d been delayed hearing out Monique’s Good Old Days saga.

“Right, Gobbie. That’s it, then.” We were in a nosh bar near the St Peterskirche. I’d paid a king’s ransom for two coffees and a cake. “They’ll hit the Repository in two days.”

“How’ll they get the stuff out, Lovejoy? It’s a hell of a lot to get in by legitimate means, let alone rob.”

“Wish I knew. Where’s Lysette going to meet us?”

We left, me thinking I’d solved nearly everything, talking over old scams. The cafes of Zurich aren’t a patch on the Paris ones, which have atmosphere. I know Switzerland pretends to be over seven centuries old, but that’s a fib. But Paris really truly has it. I said as much to Gobbie, laughing. He looked at me doubtfully as we walked down a narrow street to the Fraumünster. I was saying what a high old time I’d had in Paris, racing Guy and Veronique round the antique shops, how I’d seen the main fakes’ storage area there for the Troude-Monique scam.

Talking to myself. Gobbie had stopped. He was in the gloaming behind me, standing quite still. It was coming dusk.

“Gobbie?” I called back. “You all right?”

He came on slowly. “Lovejoy?” he asked. “You do understand?”

“Eh?” I could have clouted the silly old git. “Course I do! I’m the one called you in, you burke.” Maybe it was senility.

“Then tell me.” There was hardly anyone about. The Fraumünster was lit. We would have seen eavesdroppers.

“Tell you?” Of all the frigging cheek. Here was this old loon that I’d called out of retirement, accusing me of not sussing an antiques heist? I suppressed my anger, took a breath. I liked the old soldier. He and Lysette got on well. I didn’t want her raging at me because of my temper.

So, strolling to the Fraumünster—clever architecture, I’m sure, but somehow threatening—I summarized the entire scam for his thick idiot brain. I mean, I’d only unmothballed him because he knew the Continent, for God’s sake.

“Look, Gobbie,” I told him, words of half a syllable for his cretinoidal nut. “These French raise a syndicate, see? Anglo-French money. They use it to create a zillion superb fakes, mostly furniture.” Christ, I’d given it to the old dolt clear as day. He’d seen the bloody vans filled with the stuff.

“And?” He’d gone all quiet. You can really go off people, even friends. I hated the bastard.

“And, moron,” I sailed on,“ they lodge them into the biggest antiques repository on earth. Got it so far?”

“And?”

One more “And’ and I’d do him. “Then they nick them, and claim on the insurance—as if they were all genuine!” I chuckled, such gaiety. “See? Now, the Repository’s no innocent about security, so the Commandant will have egg on his face when his robbery team goes in!”

My laughter died away. He’d stopped. We were out into the Fraumünster’s famous square, except it’s got more side’s than even Swiss squares should have. “And?”

“Well,” I said, trying to recapture the moment. His old whiskery face was staring at me in disbelief. “I thought me and thee’d hang about for the last act. See Marimee’s face when…”

“I thought even you’d have spotted the obvious, Lovejoy.” His voice was so quiet I had to strain to hear the old loon.

“Even me?” I tapped his chest, choking on rage. “Listen to me, you silly old sod. I brought you over because you wanted one last go at an all time grandy. What was it you said, at that boot sale? Bring the old times back. And I have! This is the… Gobbie?” I almost stepped back in horror. He was crying.

Tears were streaming down his face. I gaped. Men don’t weep. We’re not allowed. Old soldiers like Gobbie especially don’t. They’ve seen it all. And why don’t these silly old soaks shave proper, for God’s sake?

“Gobbie?” I said dully. “What’s up, pal? I’m not really narked. Honest.”

“Lovejoy,” he managed, in a terrible silent voice I’d never heard him use before. I can hear it yet. Close my eyes, and I see him in that floodlit square under the towering Zurich church. “What about the children?”